New York City Life and Popular Speech

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Through Mannahatta's streets I walking, these things gathering. Walt Whitman, "Our Old Feuillage" The hundreds, even thousands, of words and phrases of slang and other popular speech about life in New York, especially Manhattan, are a treasure trove of social and cultural history. A distinctive word culture of social life in the city flowed from the modern cycle of urban growth that started significantly in the 1840s. These words about the city, individually and taken together, retell in a new voice the story of metropolitan life down to the 1950s, when so much national attention began to turn away from the culture of the old metropolitan core and toward the suburbs. Many of these word images of the city are still in our speechways and, more important, in our thoughtways. New words and new meanings of old words, even flippant and ephemeral ones, are cultural creations that burst upon a silence and bring new thoughts and new ways of seeing into existence. What indeed can slangy, frivolous, fanciful, but undeniably popular expressions of the urban experience tell us about the history and culture of cities in general and of New York in particular? Just consider the city lore prompted by the mere mention of names like The Big Apple, The Great White Way, butter-and-egg Man, golddigger, rubbernecker, Sugar Hill, rent party, The Tenderloin, the urban jungle, hooker, straphanger, hot dog, cliff dweller, tar beach, spieler, yellow journalism, breadline, hokey-pokey man, The Upper Ten, The Four Hundred, herkimer jerkimer, or appleknocker — to mention only several. The popular culture of big American cities, including its speechways, historically has been led by New York, which by the middle of the nineteenth century was emerging to lead the national urban culture in many other ways as well. New York became the preeminent national city and swelled with pride and talk of itself. The city's word images of itself, with the early help of print and journalism, diffused and influenced the nation's image of New York and, by extension, of all big cities. The city's nineteenth-century dominance of publishing, popular music, minstrelsy, vaudeville, and, early in this century, movies and radio all amplified the New York idiom and took it across the nation. Other large American cities had a similar urban experience in the same period and made their own contributions. These words spread to New York and elsewhere, just as New York idioms diffused to other parts of the country. New Yorkers took some of these expressions from other cities, such as skid row from Seattle, and gave them their own special meanings. Just as readily, other cities adopted and adapted New York's words. San Francisco today calls its nightclub district The Tenderloin, That evocative name originated in the 1880s for the notorious area of nightlife and vice on the west side of Manhattan. Many other popular expressions about life in American cities either originated in or had close associations with Manhattan. The city's history is the archetype of metropolitan development and most fully represents the American experience of city life. New York, of all American cities, most profusely made up words and phrases about the metropolitan experience and created the most distinctive word image of its urban world. The historian Thomas Bender has written that the culture of New York is "based on premises not quite shared by the dominant American culture."